(CN) — Environmental groups sued the federal government on Thursday for concluding that an 807-mile pipeline project across Alaska would not harm imperiled polar bears and Arctic whale species.
The Ninth Circuit complaint filed by the Center for Biological Diversity and Sierra Club challenges two biological opinions by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service for a new liquified natural gas project called the Alaska LNG Project.
“The project is a massive, massive fossil fuel project in Alaska that will wreak havoc on everything from polar bears to Cook Inlet beluga whales, and our planet,” Kristen Monsell, an attorney for the center, said in an interview.
The Alaska Gasline Development Corporation’s $38.7 billion project will extend an 807-mile pipeline from a gas treatment plant on the North Slope down to a liquefaction facility in Nikiski within the state’s southern Kenai Peninsula. By doing so, the company expects to produce an average of 3.5 billion cubic feet of gas per day and with the majority of gas going to international markets.
The environmental groups claim that burning this amount of gas could result in over 50 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions per year — a number they compare to building 13 coal-fired power plants.
“The Fish and Wildlife Service issued a biological opinion on polar bears and other animals under its jurisdiction and found that project won’t jeopardize the species and that the project won’t put the species further at risk,” Monsell said.
Polar bears are listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act due to the loss of ice habitat from global warming. Fish and Wildlife's last assessment of polar bears, in 2023, projected that “the likely effect of continued warming will be that most polar bear subpopulations will decline or continue to decline.”
The National Marine Fisheries Service reached the same conclusion for Cook Inlet beluga whales and North Pacific Right Whales, Monsell noted, adding that the conclusions are inadequate, unsupported by the best available science and flout the agencies’ obligations to the animals under the Endangered Species Act.
According to estimates from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the pipeline project would increase large vessel traffic by 75% in the Cook Inlet, a habitat home to the very same whale populations thought to have less than 500 individuals due to climate change, hunting, vessel strikes and other factors.
In response to the groups’ lawsuit on Thursday, Tim Fitzpatrick of the Alaska Gasline Development Corporation defended the project’s environmental merits.
“Alaska LNG has withstood intensive environmental scrutiny by two successive administrations because of its obvious and abundant benefits, which include reducing global emissions by up to 2.3 billion tons, strengthening allied energy security and finally ending longstanding air quality problems plaguing interior Alaska villages and communities,” Fitzpatrick wrote in an email.
For environmentalists, however, the feds’ approval of this project reflects an ongoing pattern of rubber-stamping large oil and gas projects — and especially in Alaska — without enough oversight on the environmental risks.
“We see the same flaws over and over again in a lot of the analyses that the agencies are doing, which is really unfortunate because the Endangered Species Act is an incredibly powerful conservation tool that has led the recovery of several endangered species, but only when it’s being implemented by agencies that are charged with saving these animals,” Monsell said.
Besides those issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, all legal challenges to permits involving liquified natural gas projects are filed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — a provision made under the Natural Gas Act.
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